Psychoanalytic Thinking and the Sexual Politics of Style

At the very least, popular notions of homosexual identity and homosexual orientation today tend to insist on the conjunction of sexual morphology and sexual subjectivity: they presume a convergence in the sexual actor of a deviant personal style with a deviant erotic desire.

—David Halperin, How to Do the History of Homosexuality (2002)

We know full well that the "creative mind" is always under "the jurisdiction of the police" and that the purpose of such policing is to protect the constitutive boundaries of the face by which the social order figures itself to itself; one might say that this policing bespeaks the extent to which the symbolic order is mobilized to defend an imaginary self-image against those forces that are seen as threatening to unmask it as always only imaginary.

—Lee Edelman, Homographesis (1994)

When seminal French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan published his influential collection Écrits in 1966, he prefaced it not as we might expect with a discussion of the unconscious, dreams, Oedipus, or any number of other familiar concepts that populate the landscape of psychoanalysis. Instead, he curiously employed the brief (and for decades untranslated into English) overture to the book to argue against the continuing contemporary leverage of Buffon's famous aphorism, "the style is the man himself."¹ According to Lacan, we often fail to see that this durable idea's persistent influence is enormously problematic because of the way it assumes a singular, coherent self that can be discerned through an analysis of style by those knowing enough to decipher its signs. Despite this important complaint, however, literary critics, I contend, have been remarkably slow to acknowledge fully Lacan's compelling indictment of the problem of modern Western culture's habitual affixing of literary style and identity. And though Lacan intends his critique as a general indictment of that culture's "commonsense" intuition that style is an inscription of a fixed personal identity, his point also marks an even more crucial intervention for the study of style's relation to the sex/gender system. That is to say, it usefully problematizes the worrisomely common theory, as Eric Haralson describes it, that "aspects of style . . . can reveal or betray authorial sexuality."² In what follows, I argue that what is especially troubling about what seems to be literary criticism's ideological reluctance to take a hard look at the political realities of a conception of style that refuses to die (i.e., that style is a legible representation of sexual desire) is that this hypothesis takes on dark implications for nonheterosexual people, those subjects who have found that literary style in our time has wrongly become yet another threatening exposition of their sexual selves.³ What we need instead, I maintain, is a revised theory of literary style that forcefully decouples it from absolutist judgments about sexual desire and that modestly but radically forfeits the critic's authority to peer into the writer's sexuality and offer a verdict. Such a revised theory will help to purge one of contemporary literary criticism's most subtly reactionary practices and will help to usher in a more genuinely progressive, less sexually diagnostic literary criticism.

Renowned critic George Steiner, to point to just one particularly vivid example of the sort of sexually diagnostic reading I have described, talks candidly of the common assumption among literary critics of a genetic connection between style and homosexuality. Steiner suggests, in fact, that among the most important historical roles homosexuality has played in the West is as a narcissistic counterpoint to realistic modes of representation—the supposedly natural condition of healthy, communal, heterosexual expression. Writing that violates the demands of realism, that exceeds it by employing a novel or unusual parlance, he says, is homosexual in its orientation. In other words, Steiner understands homosexuality to be the precipitating stimulant of a literary style that is so self-absorbed that it divides the homosexual's disruptively antisocial idiom from that of the community:

So far as much of the best, of the most original in modern art and literature is autistic, i.e. unable or unwilling to look to...